Water conservation and use is a highly pertinent issue in today’s
world as many countries are facing or expected to face high water risks
within this decade. Thus understanding and monitoring water usage can
prove to be crucial to institute and implement apt policies to
effectively combat risk posed by water shortages. This project seeks to
extract and map these trends in water use across the globe using
AQAUSTAT database maintained by the UN FAO.
The following graph displays the total water use across different countries in 2019.
It is possible that water use may be correlated with GDP per capita of any country. The animation below maps the trend of water use vs GDP per Capita of all countries in the datbase.
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It is evident from the graph above that GDP per capita doesn’t have
any correlation with water use.
Diving further, the graph
below maps the trend of water use per capita in the 10 largest economies
from 2000 to 2019.
It is encouraging to observe that water use has declined or plateaued
in these countries over the last 20 years. However, United States and
Canada still remain the highest consumers of water resources over the 20
year period in question.
Total water use can be considered to be broadly composed of three use categories : Agricultural, Industrial and Municipal/Domestic. The graphs below displays water use among all the countries in 2019.
When choosing different sectors, the difference in scales in the map
between the three sectors is noticeable. This hints of an unequal
distribution of water use among the three sectors. The stacked area
chart below verifies this observation.
The two graphs below display the breakdown of water use by sector. The first graph shows the country trend when mapped against their GDP per capita.
Through the plot above, we’re able to discern some patterns in
agricutural water use. High agricultural water use is observed in
countries with lower GDP per capita, which is an expected result, as the
economies of such countries tend to be more heavily reliant on the
agricultural sector. Countries that are more heavily industrialized like
China, also show large water use in the industrial sector.
The second chart illustrates the water use pattern among the 10 largest economies in 2019. Even here, the differences in water use are very apparent.